Sienna is the worst special killer in the game

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Hi,

lets ignore exactly BW with exactly bolt and exactly increased charge speed during her passive venting. (I’d like to argue even that is subpar but i can see why people would disagree so lets just ignore it).

I mostly play cata wtih added difficulty like twitch/deeds whatever and with a group of only 2 human players or less. The spawnrate of specials is high and often times “time to kill” needs to be super low to not instadie/have a chance to deal with the gunner/flamer whatever.

All of Siennas ranged weapons perform incredibly poorly compared to these other ranged weapons:
crossbow, handgun, repeater handgun, repeater pistols, longbow, moonbow and id say even shades repeater xbow does the job significantly better than all of siennas weapons.

This mostly comes down to 2 reason in particular: Time to kill and/or weakness against armor.

All of the staves that shoot her “normal” projectile (e.g. Conflag) have the against armor weakness and even if you hit the head - its not even a 1 shot - nevermind the lack of precision.

Bolt has waaaay too much charge time + it slows you down while charging. Compared to the handgun which also has “downtime” the problem here is that the charge is frontloaded. I cant reload when i get a good chance to - i have to invest the time when im surrounded by a bunch of trash and theres a ratling an assassin and a flamer right next to me. The time to kill is straight up too long compared to all the weapons above^.

beam with left+right click is the least awful option but again… the time to kill and precision required is just too high. if it takes 2 seconds then its still double of what other classes ranged weapons need and its the difference between dying instantly and not dying. Beam either requires “charging” until right click to kill or 2 hits 1 of which HAS to be a headshot (compared to things like Longbow which requires exactly 1 headshot consistently but also kills on 2 bodyshots - beam does NOT kill on 2 bodyshots (instant rightclick).

Fireball instant charge has breakpoints problems against armor in particular unless you get really really lucky with crits and again other classes ranged weapons just perform consistently better at any range.

Just in general her ranged weapons rely A LOT on her talent synergy, some weapon functions are completely terrible until you pair them with certain talents/classes.

Can Sienna please get a single weapon that can compete with the extremely powerful ranged options that other classes have. She is a mage - why is her ranged so incredibly weak against specials by comparison based on time to kill and ability to kill.

Sincerely - please give her a good ranged weapon to deal with specials

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Beam is usually pretty good even in high intensity situations, unless you are all alone and there’s 10 specials chasing you, but at that point you’ll have trouble regardless of what you are playing. The new hexen staff is also surprisingly strong even at very long range. You also have bolt which is super good on any career. She’s fine imo. Probably the most powerful character in the game right now, through and through. Not only able to handle pretty much any kind of specific situation, but almost always being highly versatile as well.

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Beam with headshot right clicks(while shooting) kills or at least staggers most specials and it ahs very good range, not to mention Kaboom staggering and oftenkilling specials with its dot. The Volcanic Bolt Staff build destorys anything that is not a CW /boss anyways in 1 shot usually.
Pyro is pretty out of space excpet in CW, tho fireball spam can still work, and ult can be aimed directly, letting you snipe specific enemies
Unchained with fireball or blot staff should have no problem delaing with specials at all.
Obviously with Flamethrower staff you’ll have a hard time dealing with specials…
I’d say Sienna in general shouldn’t have problem killing specials at all in my opinion.

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In my opinion Bolt is her special killing weapon, and it is just fine. With appropriate career and break points it one shots all specials, zerks, and SV on Cata 3.

It’s slower than other special killing weapons. However, it has four primary advantages.

  1. It cleaves horde. Therefore, that situation where a packmaster is rolling up on a team overwhelmed by horde. Bolt fixes that no problem.
  2. It is the size of a log and therefore it is very hard to miss at extreme range. . . where it still one shots everything all the time.
  3. No ammo.
  4. It cleaves horde, and can act as very effective horde clear as well.

Time to kill isn’t much of a factor in V2 unless you are talking about being in a situation where you are overwhelmed, and your team is all dead or not doing anything. It is only under those circumstances where you need to kill extremely fast. In those situations, Battle Wizard in particular can bring quite a few tools that will free up time to deal with tricky threats where a Waystalker, Bounty Hunter or Engineer would need to position and reposition extremely well to not get pinned down. Huntsman is a completely different story, he also brings fantastic tools for tricky situations.

You can mitigate being slowed during charging a Bolt by dodging in the direction you want to travel.

Bolt staff, on Battle Wizard, Pyro, or Unchained is on a career platform that can either stagger, escape, or just plain ol’ fight its way out of some pretty severe circumstances. You can generally create enough space for a fully charged bolt unless fully surrounded, and even in that case, Battle Wizard can just ult to get a charged shot off.

You have to build it right, but if there are no faster special killers in the group, Bolt will do everything that the faster special killers do and more. Sure, you aren’t going to get special and elite green circles when a bounty hunter is around because of the speed, but if you are sitting there with bolt you will be helping with horde and doing backup special duty. It’s super strong.

I struggle with the initial argumentation because I could open up with, “Lets Ignore Bounty Hunter with Xbow” and he would be in the same Boat. If you want to kill specials with Saltz you run BH Xbow, if you want to kill specials on Sienna you run BW or potentially Pyro and Bolt. There are a few trick builds on Unchained, and Zealot that break that mold so even that isn’t a rule. I’ve got 350+ levels on all of the characters, and I am always disappointed with I show up with BW Bolt and there is a bounty hunters, but that is a bad team comp. If I play a second game, I run something else unless the BH wasn’t doing a great job.

My problems with Sienna are that Pyro needs something to keep up these days unless you play just one build (IMO), and she feels to similar no matter how you play here. She doesn’t feel differentiated, and therefore can get pretty boring pretty fast regardless of the career you chose.

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This was always a disappointment I had about Sienna’s Staff’s is that there really wasn’t at least one sniper type feeling weapon in the bunch. Though every staff is unique I give it that. Meanwhile, every other characters fits into the realm of handgun, shotgun, or bow. Where bow is high headshot multiplier or handgun is high bodyshot, but poor headshot.

Sienna just comes across as very AoE damage based in all of those staff designs.

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And here I’m enjoying the hell out of Beam Staff and Bolt Staff feeling like Sienna is one of the best special dealers in the game.
Honestly even though your post makes sense I still don’t see any problem with Sienna’s lack of such weapon. She feels totally fine.

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Just gonna drop this here:

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@eder
Your gameplayfootage was taken on a difficulty significantly lower than what i play on.

Please make sure that if you want to contribute to the topic - youre at least playing at the same level of difficulty. It really is a very different game to what youre used to if youre not playing cata.

Everything dies to everything below Cata. Sienna not being able to hit breakpoints at exactly cata difficulty is part of the problem (and she probably gets better at modded difficulties since bolt will continue to 1shot even there when the weapons i mentioned in the OP start not reaching breakpoints as well and their time to kill gets higher as a result - but i dont feel the game should be balanced around modded and i have some other issues with some of the things that cata+ does to the game but nevermind those - Onslaught like changes to the difficulty are a lot more appealing to me)

On a completely different note - in the OP i said “repeater pistols” - that was incorrect - i meant to say “brace of pistols” - got the names mixed up.

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Sienna is the type to specialize, she doesnt do everything well at the same time, just a few or even many things exceptionally well.

That just happens to mean that some stuff like quickscoping specials might not be her thing…but even so battlewiz is contending for the most powerful character in the game.

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Fireball isn’t all that bad in cata either. It’s respectable.
One shotting packmasters is especially good and with some QQ cancelling unarmored specials are dealt with ease. Armoured specials are more problematic but even they die in 3 quick fireballs.

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Can’t be the best at absolutely everything.

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BOLT STAFF AND BEAM STAFF

This entire thread is insane. “disregarding sienna’s staffs specifically made for killing specials and high value targets from long ranges, sienna is the worst at killing specials!”

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You decided to read/understand half of a single sentence. Maybe thats just the extent of your attention span idk mate.

Anyway since the “you ignore her best special kill option - what if i do the same thing on class XXX” has come up twice ill adress it.

Bolt is BAD at killing specials when compared to things like handgun (and a bunch of other weapons for that matter) for the reasons i explained above. With handgun you get to delete a special instantly and then spend your downtime whenever. With bolt you spend an absurd amount of time and then get your kill.

Siennas bolt performs well on battle wizard with exactly her talent that speeds up her charge and even then only if her passive is off cd and the cooldown actually procs without that talent the staff again performs awful unless youre already at high overcharge - also if you even barely hit red overcharge after your shot your melee is awful until it goes down and that REALLY screws you.

Anyway - to address the “you cant just ignore crossbow bh” argument.

Actually yes you can do that for all the other classes! I genuinely dont understand how thats not obvious.

You put Longbow / Handgun / Repeater handgun / Brace of pistols / Crossbow /Moonbow and so on on ANY OTHER class in the game and they will still perform AMAZING. Thats because these weapons require 0 support outside of enhanced power and maybe power vs for breakpoints.

Its completely different for sienna where even on her most optimal class setup with her most optimal weapon with talents specifically chosen to support the weapon there are scenarios where the weapon will perform horribly (i.e. low overcharge bw without charge passive up).

Its ridiculous tbh.

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Well, yeah, but it’s fine. She’s good at most things and a solid 2nd at everything else.

The only part of Sienna that actually needs to be better at killing specials is Burning Head, and that’s a topic and a half on its own.

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Press the vent button, you’re BW, it’s not like you’re going to be lacking in thp.

Your name is cata twitch only and you talked about onslaught earlier, it shouldn’t be hard to see why a weapon with unlimited ammo that does great elite damage, has insane special breakpoints at every range and penetrates hordes super well is a top tier sniping weapon.

If you were arguing that BW is overtuned compared to other sienna classes which causes some issues with staff balance you’d get plenty of agreement, but saying silly stuff like shade xbow being better than all of siennas staffs at special sniping just kills your entire argument.

Like come on man, saying stuff like this just makes you look unreasonable

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The problem with her staffs is that they do not feel like a handgun/bow/crossbow. Handgun is literal hitscan. Instant fire, reload afterwards. One shots and bodyshots enemies instantly. Crossbow has slighly lower bodyshot damage, but has higher headshot multipler. Still 1HKO’s enemies on Legend difficulty.

Sienna’s bolt staff has higher power allowing you to body shot enemies, but the charge time is very high unless you use Battle Wizard’s 40% faster charge time on for her passive vent talent cooldown (aka once very 6 seconds). Beam staff is a hitscan, but weaker move requiring you either to track for awhile on a target without interruption between contact point and release. Otherwise, requires multiple shots back to back.

Both aren’t super satisfying and the botl staff in particular with its slow down animation feels awkward to use. You get used to it, but nothing feels as satisfying as quick swapping melee → snipe → melee in quick succession.

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Just charge the bolt staff when you hear the specials spawn. It takes less than a second.

If you can’t aim the staff that’s your issue, she has a hitscan sniper staff if you can’t. Bolt staff is the best projectile in the game by far. Landing headshots across against the grain on a moving blightstormer is the most satisfying thing in the entire game.

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The crux of it is Sienna trades immediate single target damage for aoe damage in most cases. It’s a tradeoff.

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I’d argue that the conflag staff light attack could stand to be buffed as well. The fireballs are pretty lame unless you’re a QQ fiend and the staff could use a little shine in general these days.

Beam staff also some some obnoxious properties that could stand to be adjusted, like the quick zoom that makes chaining snipes headache inducing. Or the lack of any sort of cue that the snipe blast is charged.

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Moonbow´s a funny argument given how you can shoot 5 targets before you´re down for the next 5 seconds for a single extra shot, 18 sec if you want a full round of shots.

That downtime doesnt count for anything from your perspective? During events in QP, certain game modes/twitch you wont get far at all with just 5 shots when enemies are rolling in.

Additionally you cant just ignore all the other aspects of one weapon to then call it bad because it does badly in one of them. That´d be as if i were to say (elf) longbow is utter crap because it doesnt have good monster damage.

Or saying hagbane is awful because it doesnt deal well with super armor, which boltstaff can 2-3 shot with some builds i´ve seen.

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